ADDED: Sorry I had the wrong link before. It's corrected now, but let me keep the wrong link too, which went to a second article in Forbes "A Guide To Talking Politics At The Thanksgiving Table." Maybe you've already started talking about politics at the Thanksgiving table, and, if so, I hope you're doing it the right way... or close enough.

I would like to read the article on the Plymouth constitution, if you could point it out? The Mayflower Compact itself is very terse, and doesn't get into any detail.

The 1630 constitution is bog-standard New England yeomanry, very little explicit reference to any sort of abstraction or philosophic nattering on about utopian ideals.

Bradford talks about Plato elsewhere in his account, but it isn't directly related to the actual constitutional agreement, but rather the utopian fruit of the initial legislation produced under the compact.

I took a political philosophy class from a Leo Strauss disciple who maintains that people have grossly misunderstood what Plato was really saying in The Republic.

The structure of the book is a dialog between Socrates and various Athenians about the nature of justice and the institutions that would be necessary to achieve it. After a whole bunch of preliminaries and sub-arguments, it turns out that, to really achieve a just society, you have to make kings of philosophers. The trouble is, the true philosopher doesn't want to be the king, so he has to be forced to do the job.

And this is where the Straussian opinion diverges from what they see as less-sophisticated takes. The just society requires an enormous injustice (enslavement of the philosopher king) to work. In other words, a truly just society is a contradiction, i.e., impossible.

Thus, Plato's Republic is not an argument for Utopia but rather a proof that the perfection of men and society is impossible.

One version of the tale Ann seems to have meant to link to is here (the Volokh Conspiracy publishes it every Thanksgiving Day). But the only place you'll find Plato in there is in the linked Tom Bethell piece.

I've run into wild turkeys more than once, though never actually been chased by one. My advice would be not to mess with them. They haven't been bred into breast-meat lodes like the domesticated kind, and they can move more rapidly than you'd think. Use the same caution you would approaching swans.

The thing is in small groups, humans need communism in order to survive. But as the population grows, capitalism is the natural evolution of society. TO force communism on a large population of distinct communities is wrong.

Alex, I've found that describing the communistic or communal approach to governance as a "category error" helps with the academic sort. That is, to try to apply the economic logic of the family to the nation, or even the city, is an intellectual mistake similar to medieval political conceits comparing a country to a human body, with the head, hands, feet and so forth. It makes the target audience ashamed to be caught out in a superstition, when framed in that fashion. A scaling error is still a fallacy, regardless of how high-toned the fallacy.

Doesn't help with the chuckleheads who actually made the difference in the recent election, but nobody likes to think of themselves as "low-information voters", so it might help.